In the wake of the New York Times' Amazon exposé, which shed light on a "bruising workplace" culture, the e-retailer/tech giant has been making reputation-enhancing adjustments.

The story, published in August, alleged an environment where employees are "encouraged to tear apart one another's ideas in meetings, toil long and late ... and held to standards that the company boasts are 'unreasonably high,'" according to an unnamed source. Following the report, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, plummeted from the No. 1-rated CEO to No. 87 in October's Harvard Business Review.

Among Amazon's modifications are a new parental leave policy, announced Monday, which offers 20 weeks of paid leave for new mothers and six weeks of paternity leave for new fathers; the latter move prompted chatter across Twitter:

Amazon puts other companies to shame: new moms get 20 weeks paid family leave and dads get 6 http://ow.ly/UbOgR

Pleased Amazon not only caught up on but also innovated parental leave policies, good step for the company & the industry. A lot left to do!

More recognition that #dads are parents, too: Amazon offers paid #paternityleave for first time http://to.pbs.org/1KVwEGB @NewsHour #TheNewDad

I applaud Amazon for making significant improvements to its parental leave policy. Sometimes it pays to listen. https://twitter.com/techcrunch/status/661387305626693632 ...

Still, others believed the announcement had less to do with creating a positive workplace environment, and more to do with PR crisis control:

@jodikantor @nytimes @DavidStreitfeld something that existed in many countries for over 50 years. What a progress...

@jodikantor which the employees will never get to use because of the corporate culture and fear of retribution.

Amazon has not explicitly stated that the policy changes were motivated by the New York Times story, but, either way, the story brought attention to the importance of fair labor practices in the booming tech industry.